I'm an individual who has designed [1] and built his own tDCS device, downloaded all the PDFs, read them and then designed his own experiment: anode over LDLPFC and cathode above right eye, 20 minutes at 2 mA, while doing Dual-N-Back Workshop [2].
I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests.
I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior.
I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that?
Sorry to be a pessimist here, but is there any evidence that you've increased your intelligence in anything that can't be trained? Dual-N-Back benefits from training, IQ tests benefit from training, and fluid intelligence is really such a subjective term its hard to tell anything based on that. Can you elaborate on the "minor issues" that it has helped with, how your "fluid intelligence" has gone up, and what your mental exercise routine is? I don't mean to be nasty, but I do have a healthy dose of skepticism about many of these topics.
Why would I consider your response pessimistic? It seems to be a totally valid remark to me.
No, there is no evidence at all. However, the medication I have been taking, is known to improve the ability to focus in people with a certain DNA marker. And I have that DNA marker and I take this medication. The same goes with tDCS, over and over it is proven to improve certain brain functions, I have been using this device for the last 3 years now, the device has built in checks that show me that the current is actually going through my skull, I've seen the studies that show the flow of the electrons and I know where the electrodes are placed. I think we can make some assertions on the effects this has had on my brain?
Regarding the minor issues, I sometimes have small bouts of depression, nothing too bad really, I never contemplate suicide for example, but still, it is nice that after a tDCS session these depressions tend to disappear. It could be coincidence, but there are research papers http://www.tmslab.org/publications/165.pdf that also seem to imply that tDCS helps with depressions.
The mental exercise consisted mainly of no longer using my episodic memory (I have very limited time related memory storage, it's really pathetic in some sense) and reading hundreds of audiobooks on the following topics:
Psychology, Early Roman Civilization, Early Christian Religion, General History, Battle Tactics, Modern Warfare, Late Christian Religions, Philosophy, Story Telling, Programming (well, I just learned that on the computer, not with an audio book).
As a result of doing that for a long time (over 10 years), 5 hours per day, I am now a theoretical subject matter expert on a wide range of topics.
Over 10 years! I am extremely impressed with your dedication. You must've spent maybe 20,000 hours listening to audiobooks, which is kind of astonishing. I would almost be more impressed if you emerged from such a regimen without being a subject matter expert.
In my experience, trying to assess the effects of a medication or technique on yourself is an exercise in frustration. Although you can do legitimate double-blind experiments on yourself, it's usually impossible to properly control the variables which can affect the outcome (diet, exercise, sleep, work, stress, relationships, etc. all have an impact).
So, I'm a big fan of the "assume it works because the studies say it should" approach that you describe. It's not clean or certain but it's eminently practical, and it has the fringe benefit of giving you a lot of opportunities to benefit from placebo :)
Thanks, you're one of the few that gets the implications of what I am doing and why I am doing it in this way.
One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance.
From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.
Regarding information decay, have you looked into spaced repetition? If not, I strongly suggest it, it's an effective approach to this very problem. Also, the memory palace can be very useful.
Can you expand on this? What is the medication you have been taking? With Dual N Back, do you think it improves WM on a temporary basis or is the increase permanent?
The drug in question is the widely known Modafinil, which I get in generic form from India. The gene is CYP2D6 [1], which I had checked by 23andme [2].
If you have the gene, when taken during the day, Modafinil allows you to focus for up to 12 hours straight, on the subject of your choosing (but you should choose something, or your attention span is wasted). With that focus, it is much easier to learn new things.
>I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior.
That's amazing. As someone who dabbles in nootropics and casually follows tDCS, that looks fantastic and I wish you the best in the future. We're not far from something utterly fantastical in terms of human augmentation and people like you are on the forefront.
That said: What have you won with this? What have you been able to do as a near-genius that you could not have done otherwise? What about the practical correlates of intelligence, like income or social status?
I think a major flaw in many of these self-experiments is that it uses tests that seem to have decent validity, but don't cross-validate that with real-world results.
I would definitely read whatever you published; I've bookmarked your website and will extract anything I can from it.
Income wise I've reached the point where I can now spend some time trying out some new things. I won't be able to do it for years, but that is because I buy things like new Makerbots, that's really eating into my budget.
In other aspects of life, well, that's a hard one. I consider myself one of the world's first cyborgs, with several implants (I have both magnetic sensory perception and RFID implant to computer authentication to give you some examples).
The plans I'm working on now in my leisure time are full of self indulgence. I'm working on art pieces that I'll be using for my performance art work, where I'm integrating my implants with my clothing and transportation. I have all the parts and materials, it's mainly a matter of giving each aspect of the project the time it needs to complete.
So has the rate of your income growth changed after beginning these experiments?
Are the implants your projects? Would you not have been able to do them before you started with nootropes and tDCS?
Do you feel like your art is better or more refined?
I hope these questions aren't invasive; feel free to not answer any of them; I just thought it valuable to ask because there are very few people that seem to have gone as far into this as you have, you claim to have strong results, and I'd honestly really, really like to have additional motivation to continue doing them myself.
it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests
Are these current, professionally published, individually administered IQ tests? There are only so many brands of those. "IQ tests" on the Internet are completely bogus and are not validated.
The statement you make, even if observed under the most rigorous conditions with proper tests, may just mean that you are enjoying a training effect after taking so many IQ tests. Most people don't take many IQ tests over the course of a whole lifetime, and are taken by surprise by the item content of any given IQ test. Some kinds of IQ test items have HUGE training effects (also known as practice effects), and you only get one shot at using those to estimate your IQ. (The Wechsler Block Design subtest is an outstanding example of IQ test items with strong practice effects.)
How much carry-over from all this do you get in the rest of your daily life activities outside the testing room? That's always the relevant question for any intervention that is supposed to increase IQ. Does anyone else comment that you are smarter now than you used to be?
Was your experiment double blind? Have you isolated which out of your tDCS, nootropics and mental exercises are responsible for the benefits you think you are seeing? The whole thing sounds rather unscientific thus not something I would be comfortable drawing any conclusions from.
Evidence can be unscientific and yet convincing. Very little legal evidence is scientific, but is very convincing. Humans are successful as brains because we generalize very quickly from small examples, enabling us to learn quickly and adapt quickly.
Further, academia is corrupt. Very little of the work academics do is interesting. The academic process is intensely political and the probability of something getting published is as much a function of who reviews it as it is of the quality of the work, if not more. I say this as someone exposed to academia currently.
Never limit what you can draw conclusions from! Draw conclusions from anything you can observe; but do moderate the strength of your conclusion, and the degree to which you integrate that conclusion, by the strength of the process used to produce that evidence.
Given that I am constantly deeply tempted to try such experiments myself, I can say - yes, there would be much value to me. Although it's perhaps likely I won't actually try, following along is still very interesting.
Alright, that's good to hear. Is there any specific kind of information you'd be most interested in? Side effects? Actual changes in lifestyle? Should I give it a psychological focus or write it very informal?
Previously, when I've researched this myself casually, I've found the technical information to be too vague, in terms of both building the devices and specifically where to place them, why - and how it all fits in to the reviewed literature - if at all.
But I certainly wouldn't expect the sort of rigor others are asking for in this thread - obviously this is more hobby than science, and I'd consider personal reports interesting despite being anecdotal.
But I'd invite others to follow along, using my instructions and publishing their findings (for example, before and after IQ tests), that would increase the number of participants, but not solve the control group problem.
However, if you are willing to participate, you could be part of the control group, doing only the Dual-N-Back workshop for example.
I know we should be doing blind controls, but that's really too hard to implement at this stage and we have the research papers to fall back on anyway, which have tested and proven that the tDCS device does indeed have all sorts of beneficial effects.
You could try to implement a blind test by doing tDCS with currents below those known to be effective as a control. From what I've heard under 0.5 mA should have negligible effects, though its worth looking into more studies for that. You should also implement some sort of double-blind by having another person set control the Amps for you. It wouldn't be too hard to design an experiment around this principle. I would check out some of the stuff on http://gwern.net for reference on designing quantified-self experiments to establish an effect strength.
Yeah, I know, I'm a follower of Gwern, however, like I outline elsewhere in this thread, I think that the effectiveness of the device is already proven by the research papers. IQ tests in my opinion form a good enough basis for measuring change, if they aren't taken too often (I'd suggest once every 3 years or so).
I'm really in it for the gains. I don't even care if half of it is placebo! As long as I can measure an increase in intelligence, preferably through testing, then that's good enough for me. I will always maintain a hefty bit of skepticism towards my own intelligence, just in case I'm fooling myself, but so far it seems like the gains are real.
Say, if I publish my findings and 100 people follow and see increases in their intelligence, then five years later it is published that my methods are rubbish. Will that invalide the intelligence increases these 100 people have experienced?
> Say, if I publish my findings and 100 people follow and see increases in their intelligence, then five years later it is published that my methods are rubbish. Will that invalide the intelligence increases these 100 people have experienced?
If that happens, then you've learned something very useful: whatever methods and conclusions led you or those 100 people to the conclusion that their intelligence increased - is rubbish.
It is clear you can damage your brain by having electrical current pass through it, and it has been demonstrated in a bunch of different species (including humans) that electrical charges in the brain are observable when the brain is active. And it has been demonstrated that directly stimulating motor neurons with electricity causes them to 'activate'. So the non-question is whether or not this sort of activity can effect your brain.
The question then is can the changes induced by this external stimulus have more positive than negative impact on your brain? That would be easier to answer with a better understanding of how the brain worked (as opposed to what parts of it were active when it was working) but it can certainly be an interesting source of experimentation.
What surprises me most about this research is that we have not yet invented 'wire heads' or folks who are addicted to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure cortex of their brain. There is a clear market for such a device, it would not require smuggling any narcotics, and it would seem to be nominally cheap to manufacture. Further, it would seem that finding a way to reliably stimulate the pleasure centers is a much more tractable problem than trying to stimulate memory or intelligence.
I keep an eye on this research, I've known too many people with clinical depression for whom existing therapies were unsuccessful in treating that depression, but I expect to see the illicit use appear on the market first, then I'll know we're close to answering the question posed by the article.
The parts of the brain that one would want to stimulate for direct "pleasure hits" are quite deep in the brain and at this point are only reachable [edit: there are some deep focal stimulation techniques under the development, see the other comment in this thread] with a "minimally invasive" operation (relative to other brain surgeries) that still requires several hours of anesthesia, a ~cm hole in your head, a neurosurgeon with ~13 years of post-collegiate training, and ideally an MRI scanner for guidance.
For the technique in the parent article - transcranial stimulation - any stimulation of the pleasure centers is incidental and minor. That tDCS seems to have interesting side-effects is still unexplained.
There are some ongoing studies of Deep Brain Stimulation with implanted electrodes as a treatment for depression, but it's not a casual thing to undertake.
Some of the deep brain stimulation research is focused on using a carefully constructed magnetic fields such that they can create a 'node' at any point inside the skull. Then by modulating that node create an electrical current using the available ions.
I have no idea if that will be a fruitful path for them but it has the 'feature' that it can act in any part of the brain.
Not particularly strong fields, you're not flipping water molecules like you are with CAT scan, and the point was that it can stimulate interior nodes of the brain without physically putting wires there.
Fascinating topic - glad to see it mentioned here. tDCS may be effective in improving working memory [4], treatment of depression [1], pain management [2], improved motor control [3]. You can find out how they work, how to build one, or where to get a commercial product via the r/tdcs FAQ [5].
To be fair, it does remind me of Ringworld, where 'wirehead' addicts would starve themselves to remain plugged in. Wild!
Here are some highlights that caught my attention from the article (tl;dr):
Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region:
"The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers’ brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. “Most tDCS studies don’t achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline.”
This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven’t involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. “A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I’ve learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn,” he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work “the secret sauce”."
Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training:
"Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert."
Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point:
"So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."
A wired article [0] mentions a study that found trade-offs in studying using tDCS, albeit minor ones. It sounds like tDCS increased learning rate, but also increased recall time for the knowledge learned compared to non-tDCS learning. I can't find a link to the study they summarize, but here's a quote from the article:
> Those who had the parietal area involved in numerical cognition stimulated learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham stimulation, the researchers report today in the Journal of Neuroscience. But at the end of the weeklong study their reaction times were slower when they had to put their newfound knowledge to use to solve a new task that they hadn’t seen during the training sessions. ”They had trouble accessing what they’d learned,” Cohen Kadosh said.
> The volunteers who had the prefrontal area involved in learning and memory stimulated showed the opposite pattern. They were slower than the control group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the new test at the end of the experiment. The bottom line, says Cohen Kadosh, is that stimulating either brain region had both benefits and drawbacks. ”Just like with drugs, there seem to be side effects,” he said.
I'd like to see more concrete detail on the experimental design, to convince myself that this wasn't much more than placebo effect. Additionally, assuming the effect is real, it would be nice to have a concrete and detailed theory for the mechanism through which the effect works.
I find myself extremely skeptical of these results.
I am incredibly skeptical. There are a lot of red flags here:
* Huge incentive to keep getting positive results because money was/is needed
* Higher ups insisting this is great and works before the science is finished - this can cause a lot of pressure to focus on positive results and gloss over negative
* Scatter gun approach - they're doing a lot of different experiments, and are allowed to fail on lots of them: "they want to promote research that is very cutting-edge and very risky; a 90 per cent failure rate in their portfolio is okay, because the 10 per cent that works will change the world" - it's pretty likely somewhere in that region of experiments will show results just through sheer chance. Are they controlling for this?
* A wide number of not particularly related benefits from a single, simple cause whose mechanism is not understood (I understand that breakthroughs occasionally look like this, but it's also a hallmark of snake oil)
* Possible cherry picking: "This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good" and "people do not respond equally to stimulation, and no one yet knows exactly why". Could the reason be that they are sometimes seeing positive results due to chance or placebo?
Overall, their claims are extraordinary and their evidence is anything but. I'm not saying there's nothing here, but so far I am not convinced that these researchers aren't fooling themselves.
This article is very shallow. I would rather redirect you to this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU <- Practical brain boosting in London today. I visited Andrew's lab in Wembley. Very impressive. He is also very fond of old school nootropics. Also see Hacking the Wetware meet-up - http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/79975272/
UPD: Yes, you can supercharge your brain. It is reprogrammable. But there are costs to cover and risks to take.
(Subscription needed sadly) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-s...
Read the dead tree version and it recounts a company who are building implantable devices which can be used to stimulate the vagus nerve to reduce chronic pain.
If we were talking about everyday ways to improve cognitive performance, then I'd agree with you and add "observe and control your diet to see how it affects your mind".
That said, I feel that your comment is off-topic and dismissive of the technical subject being discussed.
The brain is just a biological machine. There's no reason to believe that we can't improve its performance by manipulating its physical properties directly through technology.
Spot on. A quick perusal of many cognitive enhancement-centered communities (/r/Nootropics, Longecity, Bluelight, etc) will reveal that sleep and mindfulness are the first things that need to be improved, not last.
I was always confused about what 'mindfulness' means. Does it mean concentrating on one current thing? Then why not call it concentration.
Alternatively, does it mean that my brain has a 'controller' which goads the 'controlled' to be more mindful? To me this duality of our perception feels absurd. It creates internal conflict and somehow this is supposed to be good for you?
Do other animals feel this duality? Or this phenomenon unique to human beings?
You probably notice that sometimes you do things on habit, as a reaction, without thinking about it.
Mindfulness is being aware of what you're doing. Even if you are doing something habitual, noticing that you're doing it. If you're angry, knowing why, feeling the anger, making a decision to try and do something about it or not.
It's different than concentration because concentration indicates some intensity. Mindfulness doesn't need to be intense. You can be mindful and be doing nothing, or you can be mindful and be doing many things. It just means that you're more aware of what you're doing.
I'm sure other animals have this duality, but I would expect that they aren't as introspective as humans, so they probably don't notice it.
It's not that your brain has a 'controller'. In fact, that's about as far away from the truth as I can imagine. It's that your brain is made of many parts, and is part of your entire body. You can't really control it as a whole, but you can make an environment where it's easier to work with the cognitive side of things.
Mindfulness is being practiced in relaxing the barriers to cognition.
Concentration, on the other hand, is more like the ability to override the reward loop, and continue with a task that is getting deprioritized.
Concentration is the ability to focus on a task. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of your concentration.
Concentration is akin to a programming thread or groups of threads working on tasks. Mindfulness is akin to the thread scheduler and process manager components.
Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be mindful of your satiety. Pause between bites and feel if you are full. Another is for training. Exercise is good, but to train effectively, you have to pay attention to how your body feels, not just to prevent injuries and know when to rest, but also while training, so that you make sure every movement is actually influencing your body the way you want.
With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do.
It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.
We have habits, unconscious things we do, learned on our own or from others. We eat when we get stressed, but it's not deliberate. (Or whatever it is for you.) We have to change the way we've wired our minds to break these behaviors. So if you find yourself constantly knocking yourself down (in self-effacing jokes, internal monologue, whatever), you need to become aware of your action, and deliberately alter your behavior until it sticks. If you eat too much, you have to be aware of yourself at the dinner table, and learn to push things away or ask for a to-go box. Eventually these deliberate changes will (hopefully) stick and become the new, desired, habits and behaviors.
So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.
AFAICT, standard human behavior is a lot more multiprocess and conflicted than most of us would like to think about. Framing the situation as "Steering your emotions is like steering and elephant." is a lot more realistic and useful than a (extreme example) monoistic approach like "Why did you eat that dessert? Are you lying to me about being on a diet? Or, do you not understand how diets work? Well, which one is it?" The reality is a third option: your foreground process knows you need to lose weight, but some background process has the conflicting goal of eating high-calorie food.
The good news is that with practice, your foreground process can learn to recognize these conflicts as they are forming and gently steer them to a non-conflicting state before they get out of control. So, the end result is conflict reduction, not conflict induction.
Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong.
However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
The goal of mindfulness, in the traditions I have read. Is ultimately to understand that the act of watching is no different from the thoughts being watched. It is by doing the watching that one realizes over time that there is no watcher. This leads into the idea that if there is no watcher, you/I must be the thoughts themselves. If we are the thoughts themselves, then we are the words, we are the sound waves in the air. We are the patterns in the sand, the correlations in neuronal firing, there is no distinction between inside and outside, you and I, this thing and that thing. The way something reacts is no different from what a thing is.
A lot of things that appear to be bunkum are in fact bunkum. But some things which appear to be bunkum are in fact profound truth.
I come at mindfulness from a Buddhist perspective and I'm certainly not qualified to speak at any length on the topic. With that said, it should be a conflict abating - not inducing. There are no separate 'yous', but the processes that make you up can often be conflicting (I don't think anyone would dispute that). And mindfulness should be a way of reconciling and dealing with that.
What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is the me that spends most of its time:
1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?";
2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy.";
3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great."
4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc.
After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges.
One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms.
The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives.
The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).
I think it is concentration. Although I think concentration has a bit of an active feel to it, as if you're usually doing it in order to accomplish something. When I meditate I just try to be aware of what's going in my mind, my body, and my breath without judging them. The idea of a controller and a controlled entity is just a feeling that comes from an active attitude that you're somehow preserving. If you simple watch yourself it will become apparent that ways of thinking like this don't necessarily represent reality. They comes and go.
2. So far as I can tell, Nash was never treated with electroconvulsive therapy.
3. ECT has scarcely anything in common with tDCS.
4. Nash did all his best work before he became schizophrenic. I would be more inclined to blame the major mental illness for any falloff in the quantity or quality of his output, rather than the treatment he received for it.
I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests.
I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior.
I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/
[2] http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://winfred.com/